A Mobile-Based Ontology Integrated Decision Support System was built in an effort to improve the transparency in disaster situations. Using hypothetical chemical hazard scenarios, the decision-making accuracy and time taken by incident commanders using the Incident Command System was compared to incident commanders without the use of the system. The existing design of incident command systems limits the ability to manage workload and results in a limited span of knowledge. Sixteen firefighters were tested using the mobile-based ontology integrated decision support system. The results discussed in this study indicate that the information presented by the decision support system significantly improved commander’s decision-making. Potential applications of this research include Strengthening disaster risk reduction and management capacity through improved preparedness; Advancing regional and national initiatives for disaster response and risk reduction; and providing the foundation for future policies and procedures that can be easily implemented within the ICS framework.

Data analysis tasks often require grouping of information to identify trends and associations. However, as the number of elements rises to the hundreds and thousands the cost of having a person perform the groupings unassisted quickly becomes prohibitive. Previous approaches have combined traditional clustering techniques with manual interaction steps, yielding human-in-the-loop clustering algorithms that incorporate user feedback by reweighting features or adjusting a similarity function. But in the real world, many grouping tasks lack both a feature set and a well-defined (dis)similarity metric, having only a subject matter expert with an implicit understanding of the correct relationships between elements based on the domain and the task at hand. We present a refine-and-lock clustering interaction model and demonstrate its effectiveness for cognitive-assisted human clustering over other interaction models such as split/merge and must-link/can't-link. Our approach offers effective automatic clustering assistance even in the absence of clear features or a definitive similarity metric; ensures that every cluster has final user approval; and exhibits at least a 3.94× improvement over other interactive clustering approaches in time to completion.

We present KnIT, the Knowledge Integration Toolkit, a system for accelerating scientific discovery and predicting previously unknown protein-protein interactions. Such predictions enrich biological research and are pertinent to drug discovery and the understanding of disease. Unlike a prior study, KnIT is now fully automated and demonstrably scalable. It extracts information from the scientific literature, automatically identifying direct and indirect references to protein interactions, which is knowledge that can be represented in network form. It then reasons over this network with techniques such as matrix factorization and graph diffusion to predict new, previously unknown interactions. The accuracy and scope of KnIT's knowledge extractions are validated using comparisons to structured, manually curated data sources as well as by performing retrospective studies that predict subsequent literature discoveries using literature available prior to a given date. The KnIT methodology is a step towards automated hypothesis generation from text, with potential application to other scientific domains.

Keeping up with the ever-expanding flow of data and publications is untenable and poses a fundamental bottleneck to scientific progress. Current search technologies typically find many relevant documents, but they do not extract and organize the information content of these documents or suggest new scientific hypotheses based on this organized content. We present an initial case study on KnIT, a prototype system that mines the information contained in the scientific literature, represents it explicitly in a queriable network, and then further reasons upon these data to generate novel and experimentally testable hypotheses. KnIT combines entity detection with neighbor-text feature analysis and with graph-based diffusion of information to identify potential new properties of entities that are strongly implied by existing relationships. We discuss a successful application of our approach that mines the published literature to identify new protein kinases that phosphorylate the protein tumor suppressor p53. Retrospective analysis demonstrates the accuracy of this approach and ongoing laboratory experiments suggest that kinases identified by our system may indeed phosphorylate p53. These results establish proof of principle for automated hypothesis generation and discovery based on text mining of the scientific literature.

The social Customer Relationship Management (CRM) landscape is attracting significant attention from customers and enterprises alike as a sustainable channel for tracking, managing and improving customer relations. Enterprises are taking a hard look at this open, unmediated platform because the community effect generated on this channel can have a telling effect on their brand image, potential market opportunity and customer loyalty. In this work we present our experiences in building a system that mines conversations on social platforms to identify and prioritize those posts and messages that are relevant to enterprises. The system presented in this work aims to empower an agent or a representative in an enterprise to monitor, track and respond to customer communication while also encouraging community participation.

We propose to demonstrate an end-to-end framework for leveraging time-sensitive and critical social media information for businesses. More specifically, we focus on identifying, structuring, integrating, and exposing timely insights that are essential to marketing services and monitoring reputation over social media. Our system includes components for information extraction from text, entity resolution and integration, analytics, and a user interface.

This work summarizes challenges and experiences in monetizing user activity on public forums on social network sites. We present a approach that identifies the monetization potential of user posts and eliminates off-topic content to identify the most relevant and monetizable keywords for advertising. Preliminary studies using data from MySpace and Facebook show that 52% of ad impressions generated using keywords from our system were more targeted compared to the 30% relevant impressions generated without using our system.

Web application hybrids, popularly known as mashups, are created by integrating services on the Web using their APIs. Support for finding an API is currently provided by generic search engines or domain specific solutions such as Google and ProgrammableWeb. Shortcomings of both these solutions in terms of and reliance on user tags make the task of identifying an API challenging. Since these APIs are described in HTML documents, it is essential to look beyond the boundaries of current approaches to Web service discovery that rely on formal descriptions. In this work, we present a faceted approach to searching and ranking Web APIs that takes into consideration attributes or facets of the APIs as found in their HTML descriptions. Our method adopts current research in document classification and faceted search and introduces the serviut score to rank APIs based on their utilization and popularity. We evaluate classification, search accuracy and ranking effectiveness using available APIs while contrasting our solution with existing ones.

In this article, we demonstrate the applicability of semantic techniques for detection of Conflict of Interest (COI). We explain the common challenges involved in building scalable Semantic Web applications, in particular those addressing connecting-the-dots problems. We describe in detail the challenges involved in two important aspects on building Semantic Web applications, namely, data acquisition and entity disambiguation (or reference reconciliation). We extend upon our previous work where we integrated the collaborative network of a subset of DBLP researchers with persons in a Friend-of-a-Friend social network (FOAF). Our method finds the connections between people, measures collaboration strength, and includes heuristics that use friendship/affiliation information to provide an estimate of potential COI in a peer-review scenario. Evaluations are presented by measuring what could have been the COI between accepted papers in various conference tracks and their respective program committee members. The experimental results demonstrate that scalability can be achieved by using a dataset of over 3 million entities (all bibliographic data from DBLP and a large collection of FOAF documents).

In this paper we extend the state-of-the-art in utilizing background knowledge for supervised classification by exploiting the semantic relationships between terms explicated in Ontologies. Preliminary evaluations indicate that the new approach generally improves precision and recall, more so for hard to classify cases and reveals patterns indicating the usefulness of such background knowledge.

With the rising popularity of Web services, both academia and industry have invested considerably in Web service description standards, discovery, and composition techniques. The standards based approach utilized by Web services has supported interoperability at the syntax level. However, issues of structural and semantic heterogeneity between messages exchanged by Web services are far more complex and crucial to interoperability. It is for these reasons that we recognize the value that schema/data mappings bring to Web service descriptions. In this paper, we examine challenges to interoperability; classify the types of heterogeneities that can occur between interacting services and present a possible solution for data mediation using the mapping support provided by WSDL-S, the extensibility features of WSDL and the popular SOAP engine, Axis 2

In this paper, we describe a Semantic Web application that detects Conflict of Interest (COI) relationships among potential reviewers and authors of scientific papers. This application discovers various 'semantic associations' between the reviewers and authors in a populated ontology to determine a degree of Conflict of Interest. This ontology was created by integrating entities and relationships from two social networks, namely "knows," from a FOAF (Friend-of-a-Friend) social network and "co-author," from the underlying co-authorship network of the DBLP bibliography. We describe our experiences developing this application in the context of a class of Semantic Web applications, which have important research and engineering challenges in common. In addition, we present an evaluation of our approach for real-life COI detection.